Crosscurrent (36 page)

Kell inhaled deeply as he drove his feeders into the blood-slickened tunnels of Jaden’s nostrils. He shuddered
each time they pierced a membrane or slashed tissue. The lines of their
daen nosi
swirled around them, their motion rapid, chaotic, a reflection of Kell’s own excitement. They became so tangled he had trouble distinguishing the silver of his own lines from the red and green that denoted Jaden’s potential futures. His legs weakened at the thought of consuming the Jedi’s soup, of understanding at last, after centuries of seeking, the map of the universe and his purpose in it.

He watched his lines enmesh Jaden’s, strangle them, wipe out whatever future the Jedi might have had. His feeders pierced a membrane and squirmed for the Jedi’s brain, his soup. Jaden’s body shuddered.

Kell stared at the
daen nosi
, expecting to see Jaden’s green and red end, overcome by the silver net of Kell’s future.

Instead he saw Jaden’s lines endure, saw his own lines knotted off and consumed by the dull gray strands of another. The three sets of lines resolved into a noticeable pattern. Behind the pattern, within the pattern, Kell saw the meaning of life, his purpose.

A blaster barrel pressed up against his temple. He felt it only distantly, thickly.

“Thank you,” he said.

At first Jaden did not think he was seeing clearly, thought, perhaps, that his mind had retreated into dreams while he died. He saw Khedryn materialize beside the Anzat. Blood dripped from Khedryn’s shattered nose, and his eyes were so swollen Jaden was surprised he could see at all. He held the BlasTech E-11 in his hands, the blaster they had seen in the armory off the barracks. He had its barrel pressed against the Anzat’s head.

The Anzat’s feeders started to retract from Jaden’s nose.

“Thank you?” Khedryn said, stress raising his voice an octave higher than usual. “Frag you.”

He squeezed the trigger and turned the Anzat’s head into a fine red mist. The Anzat’s body fell to the floor, blood pouring from the neck stump. The feeder appendages, severed from the nearly vaporized head, still dangled from Jaden’s nose. Jaden sagged, wobbled. Khedryn steadied him.

“Are you all right? Jaden?”

Khedryn’s voice sounded from far away. But it was drawing closer and Jaden was returning to himself.

“I am all right,” he said to Khedryn. “Thank you.”

Khedryn smiled. “That is a thank-you I’ll accept.”

Wincing, Jaden jerked the feeders out of his nose and dropped them on the Anzat’s body. Nausea seized him and he vomited onto the floor. Khedryn put a hand on his shoulder and nodded at the Anzat’s corpse.

“That thing got to me before it got you. What is it?”

Jaden wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and straightened on shaky legs.

“An Anzat. I think he followed us from Fhost, but I’m not sure.”

“You sure you’re all right?”

Jaden took in the ruin of Khedryn’s face.

“I should be asking that of you.”

Khedryn took Jaden’s arm and helped support him. “I’ve been beaten worse than this, Jedi.” He looked down into Mother, at the slain clone and the grizzly contents of her gullet.

“What happened here? Are those the doctors and stormies? Stang.”

“Yes,” Jaden said, and deliberately did not look into Mother. “I’ll explain the rest on the way out. We must hurry. There are more surviving clones, Khedryn. They want a ship and we cannot allow that. We need to get back to
Flotsam
. Now.”

Khedryn cleared his throat, spit blood and phlegm onto the floor. “If they take my ship anywhere, I will hunt them across the ’verse.”

“Yes,” Jaden said, and activated his purple-bladed saber. He could barely hold it in his wounded hand. “We will.”

“Where did you get that lightsaber?” Khedryn asked.

“Long story.”

Together they hurried back through the facility, both holding weapons built decades earlier—Khedryn a stormtrooper-issued blaster, Jaden a lightsaber he’d built as a boy. They retraced their steps past one scene of slaughter to another. The facility seemed less ominous to Jaden now, but it still felt haunted by ghosts.

Jaden told Khedryn what he’d learned from the clone: that other clones had survived on the moon for decades, that they wanted desperately to get off, that they were mad and dangerous.

“Did they have any children?”

Khedryn’s question slowed Jaden’s steps. He had not considered that. “I … don’t know.”

By the time they neared the West Entry, Jaden had recovered some of his strength. He did not have the time or capacity to interpret all he’d learned—about the facility and himself—but he would, later.

“Did you get the answer you wanted?” Khedryn asked as he pulled up his helmet and sealed the neck ring.

“I don’t know,” Jaden admitted. He deactivated his lightsaber and started to pull up his helmet, realized that his suit was so damaged from combat with the clone that sealing it was pointless.

Seeing that, Khedryn said, “You will be cold.”

“I’ll abide,” Jaden said.

*  *  *

Relin was going to die, was going to add another failure to the long line of failures that composed his life as a Jedi. The rage went out of him as if drained through a hole in his heel. Despair replaced it, black and empty.

Saes held out a hand, and his lightsaber flew from the deck to his palm. He ignited it. In its hum, Relin heard his death pronounced.

“You understand now, at the end,” Saes said. He removed the remains of his mask and regarded Relin with yellow eyes that looked almost sympathetic. “That pleases me.”

Relin dwelled in the bottomless void of his despondence. And in the void, in its endlessness, he saw his purpose fulfilled.

He drew on the Lignan, fed its power into the hole at his core. The emptiness in him was insatiable, drinking the power as fast as he could pull it in, yet never getting filled.

His body and mind swelled with the influx. The ore dotting the deck flared in answer to his desires. Sneering, Saes drew on the Lignan himself.

Relin gripped Saes’s throat in his mental grasp. Saes tried to swat away the Force choke with his own power. His eyes widened when he realized he could not. He gasped, staggered. Relin sat up, thought of Drev, and squeezed.

Saes stumbled forward, lightsaber held high. Filled with power, Relin used the Force to pull Saes’s lightsaber from his fist. It leapt through the air and landed in Relin’s hand. He rose to his knees and Saes fell to his before Relin, still clutching his throat.

Relin had nothing more to say to his former Padawan. He drove Saes’s own lightsaber into and through his chest. Saes fell face-first to the deck without a sound.

Relin stared at the red lightsaber blade in his hand. He had resolved that he would not fight with a Jedi weapon
and he had not. He had fought with a Sith weapon and it had been appropriate.

His body felt charged, so filled with the dark side of the Force that he no longer felt human. He had transcended. He sagged to the floor among the flaring ore. The metal of the deck felt cold under him. Blood poured out of his face, his nose. Chunks of Lignan dug into his flesh. With Saes dead, he suddenly felt his injuries, and agony accompanied each breath.

But the pain of his body paled in comparison with the pain of his spirit.

He shouted, trying to purge the pain and despair in a wail that shook the crossbeams of the cargo bay. But both were infinite. He could have shouted for eternity and found no relief.

Still, he refused to fail again.

Saes had called his rage
days old
, but it was more than that. It was a conflagration, the sum total of all the repressed emotion of Relin’s life compressed into a tiny singularity of self-consuming anger and despair from which nothing could escape, not even him.

And that, he realized, was the unspoken, unacknowledged pith of the dark side—it consumed all who turned to it. Yet he did not turn away. He wanted nothing more than to be consumed, to be reduced to oblivion, annihilated. He welcomed it.

But he would not go alone.

He continued to draw in the power of the Lignan, to feed it into the hole he had become, to let it amplify his hate and despair even as he died. Power burned in him. He was vaguely conscious of the remaining crystals around him flaring, a brief flash of life before he consumed their power and turned them dull and dead.

Unbound by concern for his continuing survival, he took in as much energy as he could control. Spirals of energy formed around his body. He felt his torso growing
lighter, the flesh becoming diaphanous, transformed by power to become one with the energy.

Barely able to feel his own flesh, he nevertheless reached out for his dead Padawan. His fingers closed over Saes’s forearm and slid along until he held his former Padawan’s hand.

Tears flowed as energy gathered, turned on itself, grew stronger. Coils of blue power, like long lines of Force lightning, shot out from his flesh, roiled in the air above him, striking the ceiling and the storage containers, penetrating the ship.

He drew in more power, more, until the entire cargo bay was lit with a network of twisting, jagged lines of energy, a circulatory system through which flowed his rage. The lines spread from the cargo bay and through the ship like veins, like an enormous garrote that would strangle
Harbinger
to death. Relin’s mind became one with them. Power and hate pulsed along them with each beat of his heart. They were an extension of him and he felt them as they squirmed through the ship, wrapping it in their net, from the rear section, along the spin, to the forward section with the black scar of Drev’s grave gouged into its face.

He was ready, then.

He knew he was lost, and yet he was found.

“Laugh even when you die,” he whispered.

He squeezed Saes’s cold, scaled hand, imagined Drev’s face, and laughed for joy as the power crescendoed and began to consume
Harbinger
in fire.

Marr perceived a light through his eyelids. He struggled to open them but they felt as if they weighed a kilo. Finally able to pry them open, he winced against the glare blazing through
Junker
’s cockpit viewport.

Harbinger
fell into the moon’s thin atmosphere and skidded along, an ever-lengthening spear of flame in its
wake. Bleary-eyed, he saw fire consume the entire ship until the massive vessel exploded in a cloud of smoke and flame.

Relin had done it, he realized, but he felt no elation.

There is nothing certain
.

The autopilot was flying
Junker
straight into the aftermath of the explosion but Marr did not trust himself enough to change the ship’s course. He needed to reach the surface and hope that Jaden and Khedryn would see him and help him.

He was dying, he knew. Already the pain in his back was diminishing—not a good sign—and he felt a creeping cold enshrouding his body.

He tried to reach for the emergency distress beacon, thinking he would activate it and that matters would end as they had begun, with the beep of someone in distress.

But he could not reach it. His body no longer answered his commands.

Pain and blood loss drew him back into darkness.

Jaden and Khedryn stepped through the hatch and into the blowing snow and ice. Jaden welcomed the elements, the freezing air, and the pain. He inhaled deeply, hoping to cleanse his lungs of any residuum of Mother or the facility. Khedryn pointed ahead.

“
Flotsam
is still there.” His voice sounded metallic through his helmet’s external mike.

Jaden saw. Shields still secured the ship’s viewports. The clones had not gotten in, which meant they had not gotten off the moon … yet.

“The Anzat had a ship.”

“Right,” Khedryn said, and started trudging through the snow. “Let’s get aboard
Flotsam
and get into the air. We can find it that way.”

They had not taken five strides before a ship streaked
into view, flying low, its engines a barely audible hum over the wind. Jaden recognized the silhouette immediately from the low profile and wide wings—a CloakShape fighter, modified with a hyperspace sled and coated in the black fiberplast typical of a StealthX. It would have been almost invisible against a field of stars. In atmosphere, it looked like a piece of outer space had descended planetside.

Jaden knew that it was too late to seek cover. Khedryn must have realized the same thing. He took station beside Jaden, freed the shoulder stock on the E-11, and aimed it at the ship’s cockpit. Jaden activated his lightsaber and held his ground. The weapon’s hilt was unsteady in his two-fingered grasp. He switched to his left hand, where it felt awkward, but at least he could hold it.

The CloakShape slowed, maneuvered over them, and hovered at maybe ten meters. The energy from the engines warmed the air. The barrels of the laser cannons looked like tunnels that went on forever. Jaden and Khedryn stood still on the frozen ground, cloaked in the fighter’s faint shadow. The ship dipped its nose so that the cockpit had a clear view of them and they of it. The transparisteel was dimmed so that they could not see within. Jaden reached out with the Force—even that small effort tried him, after all he’d been through—and felt the Force presences of ten beings.

“They do have children aboard,” he said. “Or there were more clones than we thought.”

Khedryn lowered his blaster, a symbolic gesture only. The blaster could not have penetrated the CloakShape’s hide.

“Maybe they don’t know who we are or what … happened.”

Jaden shook his head, his eyes fixed on the cockpit. “No. They know I killed one of them. The holo-log said
they had an empathic connection, maybe even a telepathic one. They know.”

“Stang,” Khedryn murmured.

For a time they stood there, staring up at the unseen crew through the swirl. Finally Jaden shouted up at the cockpit.

“If you leave I will have to come after you.”

He gave that a moment to register and still received no response. He deactivated his saber, turned away from the fighter, and walked through the cold and snow for
Flotsam
.